Craig-315134 (5/9/2011)
Good article, Craig, thank you.
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it.
I do have what I hope isn't a 'stupid question', please. To be a competent SQL Server DBA, how good should my T-SQL skills be? I know some DBAs gravitate more toward development work, which I imagine would require good T-SQL skills. But what about DBAs who are more on the admin side? Do they still need to be reasonably proficient at T-SQL?
It depends on how that company handles DBA work, because the title DBA is far too generic these days. In a large shop, knowing T-SQL isn't as important if you're merely doing the rollout work for the development teams and the majority of your administrative job is to handle all of the background maintenance. Reindexing, backup/restore testings, etc. If however there is a call for Optimization, which isn't unusual because your devs simply can't see Production most of the time, and certainly don't have access to the necessary tools, then you're going to need some solid background in T-SQL optimization. Knowing execution plans, concurrency issues, index methodology, etc. There's really no way to avoid it.
However, most DBAs end up optimizing without the level of knowledge as the development teams do about the data. You simply can't know that much about that many servers and databases. So it's more a generic methodology which you'd send back to the developers if necessary.
In smaller shops, you're going to be doing a lot of everything. If you want to specialize like that, you almost have to go for a very large shop. The good news is in larger shops, they can more easily afford junior/mid to 'take a chance on' in the business.
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
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